This is exactly what your lender will do to you. They’ll demand money, ask for your income details and threaten the wrath of the law if you don’t supply them. Well, there’s no law that can make you supply income details to the lender if you have doubts about their actions. And the laws that can make you supply money allow you to make the lender justify its claim on your money first. In fact, the courts want you to make the lender justify its claim - the courts would rather you and the lender sorted this out before you went to court because they’ve got better things to do than sit there watching you and the lender having a battle that you could have had in writing before it ever came to court. Courts are expensive. Judges know that and they don’t like to see taxpayer’s money wasted. So they will not judge you badly for making the lender justify itself before going to court.

We’ve covered some of this in the section on why you should not make any offers to pay and why you should not be intimated by threats of court action. But what you need to do is be polite and insistent. These people are asking you for money. You have a right to know how they arrived at the amount they are asking for. You have a right to make sure they carried out their legal duties properly. But you shouldn’t give anything away that lets them know that you know what you are doing. All you have to do is keep asking for the information.

The questions that follow are not necessarily questions you should ask the lender directly, they are questions you have in mind as you write back to the lender. They may help to reassure you that you are in the right not to just submit to the lender’s request.

• Exactly how did it arrive at the figure it is demanding?
• Did it sell the property for its full value?
• If not, why not?
• Exactly how much did each reason it gives affect the price it accepted?
• Did it allow other factors to affect the price it accepted?
• If so, what were those factors?
• How much did they affect it?

The lender or their lawyer will criticise you for questioning them. They want you to just shut up and pay up. But there are two reasons that it is important to do this now:

1. You must get your questioning of the lender started before it makes any court claim.
2. The lender often can't answer your questions and you need evidence of their failure to answer them so that you can take that evidence into court with you if things should come to court

Some lenders, such as the Abbey National, will supply you with a "Completion Statement", setting out a breakdown of the costs. Most of these we've seen or heard about show some costs that are unusually high. Estate agents' fees and repair costs are typical examples. Query these, and if the lender cannot explain them satisfactorily, point out that you are treating their claim with the utmost seriousness and cannot help them if they don't help you resolve these issues.

Where you think they have sold your property far too cheaply, use the same approach over their valuation reports. They will rarely produce them and may tell you to (1) approach the valuers yourself or (2) get a retrospective valuation. The first is expensive and just reproduces work that has already been done while reducing the amount of cash available to settle the claim. The second is impractical and you should say so. In either situation, you should then politely keep pointing out that they must help you if you are to help resolve the issue to their satisfaction.

You can get a rough idea of the sort of price your proprety should have fetched by contacting the Land Registry. It has:

1. A free online database that you can search by year and by region.
2. several ways to search its databases
3. copies of reports it has already published
4. customised property price reports for a small fee.

Repairs are usually the reason lenders say they accepted a lower price, particularly for leasehold flats.

• What effort did they make to double-check the size of repair bills?
• What efforts did they make to ensure that you had not already paid advance demands for repairs?
• Did they sell the security property to the landlord after asking him/her if there were repairs outstanding? (This is an important question because selling the property to someone who is able to depress its price artificially by claiming it has high repair bills due puts the landlord in an unfair position to get the property cheaply. We know of several cases where lenders have done this. We believe any lender that did it without getting the value of repairs confirmed by an independent surveyor was negligent in its duty of care to the repossessee.)

The trick with negotiating is to give nothing away but to require your opponent to give information away. Their attitude to this sometimes shows you what worries them. And if you do it all in writing judges can see whether the lender was co-operative or not. That's what your lender is doing to you. If your lender has signed up to the Mortgage Code you may be able to show that they are breaching it.

Your aim, of course, is to find out how confident the lender feels about defending its actions in court. Signs that it is reluctant to produce documentation are a significant indicator. If it is not confident then your requests should encourage it to want to reduce the amount it is asking for or even drop its claims altogether. It probably won't do this until after it has served a writ. But remember, you can always offer to settle after it has served a writ - it will usually be keen to take a settlement rather than spend more money paying lawyers to explain to the judge why it wouldn't answer your questions or wouldn't settle.

Remember, lenders and debt collection agencies know all this better than you do. But they won’t tell you that.

Here are one reader's hints and tips on how to do this:

********** SOME ADVICE THAT I HOPE WILL HELP ***********

When you say you are going to resist the solicitors threats by challenging every step it will help to itemise each step. When you ask a question make sure that it is composed so that they have to give an answer. i.e.

THIS QUESTION IS OK:
Please itemise all positive selling points that were written on the sales particulars prior to the sale of the property.

THIS QUESTION IS NOT OK:
Please inform me if the property was sold correctly.

It will certainly help if you keep each question separate and give each a number. You MUST insist and KEEP insisting that they answer fully, each question as numbered. It will then become very apparent which questions they are avoiding answering. Don't worry if you find you end up with a very large number of questions. Under the new CPR (Civil Procedure Rules) for court cases a judge will not treat anyone lightly if they are seen to have avoided disclosing information specifically requested.

They may try to answer a question with the phrase "I fail to see the relevance of this question". Write back to them on this, refer to the question number and state the relevance.

DEMAND the valuations they carried out on the property saying that you cannot possibly proceed without them. You really can't be expected to be able to judge whether they undervalued the property and as a result undermarketed it, without them. If you do get them pay particular attention to the Estate Agents' valuation. It's often not done by a qualified surveyor and as such will sometimes demonstrate a blatant degree of undervaluation and/or negligence.

Keep fighting - I wish you all the best.

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